In this episode, Vera Rozanova, former CBO, lecturer, and procurement strategist with experience across P&G and Royal Canin, talks about the thing nobody wants to admit.
Most procurement teams are stuck in permanent firefighting mode, and it’s killing their potential.
Vera’s seen it everywhere. Stakeholders need something yesterday, procurement scrambles to deliver, and next month the same cycle repeats. Why does this keep happening? She breaks it down.
Procurement’s still seen as a cost center hunting quick wins. Everyone wants results they can see immediately. Finance wants lower costs, marketing wants speed, sales wants flexibility, and procurement becomes the “yes department” trying to please everyone while drowning in chaos.
- Vera says start with finance. Make them your ally, not your enemy.
- Get embedded in the budgeting cycle early.
- Sit down with stakeholders before budgets are set and understand their plans for the next year.
When someone comes asking for urgent procurement three months later, you can point back to the budget and ask what changed. Finance becomes your backup.
She walked through a project at a big agricultural company where stakeholders wanted the cheapest spare parts possible. Short-term thinking, lower upfront costs. But Vera’s team pushed back; those cheap parts were often fake or of poor quality, leading to equipment breakdowns that cost way more down the line.
They spent months getting everyone aligned on switching to the original manufacturer. More expensive upfront, but fewer breakdowns, better reliability, and lower total costs over time. That’s planning beating firefighting.
Vera talks about setting up SLAs, clear timelines, educating stakeholders quarterly (because they forget or don’t care), and making urgent purchases deliberately difficult. If it’s truly urgent, it goes to top management for approval. If it’s just poor planning on someone’s part, they wait for the next cycle. Simple as that.
Technology matters, but not the way most people think. Vera’s not talking about fancy AI replacing everyone.
- She means centralized master data, so you can actually analyze spend across countries and sites.
- P2P systems that keep everything in one place so audits don’t paralyze your team for a month.
- Automated workflows and contract lifecycle tracking.
- Generative AI for drafting documents and prepping negotiations, but check everything because it hallucinates data sometimes.
Vera’s advice for leaders drowning in chaos? Chaos is showing you what’s broken. Start with your biggest, most strategic categories. Talk to those stakeholders. Figure out why urgent requests keep happening and fix the root cause. And stop trying to be everyone’s friend by saying yes to everything. Be a real partner by helping them plan better.
Watch the full episode to hear her vision for procurement’s future when teams stop firefighting and start actually strategizing.
